#sandy stone

I've had an abiding fondness for Sandy since taking a couple of classes with her in the mid-'aughts, but anyone who cares about trans history, lesbian history, queer music history, trans studies, and trans rights who isn't familiar with her really owes it to themselves to learn more.

For Stone, the clinics offered a fascinating example of how gender is constructed in real time. Dr. Benjamin identified “born in the wrong body” as the defining self-understanding of transsexuality. Since his manual was the clinics’ manual, patients repeated this refrain year after year in order to access transition care. Even after physicians realized that their patients, too, read Benjamin, they continued to pose questions that screened out any ambiguity, as Stone herself had experienced. Through these rote scripts, performed by doctor and patient alike, transsexuality solidified into the state of passing from one side of the sex binary to its alleged opposite, a transformation that demolishes any body or experience that came before. In physicians’ hands, transsexuality reinforced, rather than broke down, the gender binary.

The “wrong body” narrative solidified into orthodoxy. In the 1970s, Stone shared, clinics even instructed transsexual women to invent a “plausible history” of their earlier lives. They were to fabricate new childhoods as if they had always been female. In the medical discourse, to transition was not only to erase one’s own past—it was to masquerade as an imaginary person.

“But it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear,” Stone objected. Universal, unrelenting passing is not the goal, she urged. Never-ending passing is a form of assimilation—an acquiescence to the status quo. Passing internalizes, rather than resists, the harmful structure of binary gender that delineates masculinity and femininity, man and woman, as fundamentally at odds. She argued that to pass perpetually, in all circumstances and interactions, forecloses the center of a person’s individual power, the complexities, ambiguities, and nuances of actual life experience. And while passing admits one to the realm of gendered respectability, it means being forced to found relationships on lies, instead of on the truths that transsexuality exposes: that all bodies are malleable texts inscribed by power.

Instead, Stone urged, “in the transsexual’s erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender… which can make common cause” with other oppressed groups. She called this new identity the “posttranssexual”—the monstrous body reclaimed, in all its complexity. Closing her manifesto with a thrilling turn, Stone wrote collectively to other academic transsexuals—an audience she had to dream into being in 1991. Stone asked “us” to write our complex realities into history instead of being scripted as monolithic caricatures by physicians, feminists like Raymond, and even ourselves. Refusing assimilation is radical politics, “begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured” body—turning transsexuality into a site of resistance and alliance. She called for “solidarity” with queers and people of color—not individual, stealth access to the status quo through the edifice of binary sex. “Although individual change is the foundation of all things,” she concluded, “it is not the end of all things.”

Trans lives, for Stone, became a jumping-off point for interrogating gender—the social dimensions of sex—and forging collective resistance to racism, capitalism, and colonialism. By contrast, trans-exclusionary feminism honed its project into one goal alone: liberating women from the oppression of men.

The singular identity “women,” removed from the reality of all other social forces besides biological sex, became a mythic category that actually obscured, rather than pried open, the workings of power. But gender—a term many TERFs and “gender critical” feminists today deem tainted by transsexuality—usefully exposed the process through which the identities of man and woman are assigned meaning. The concept of gender provided an angle onto the way social institutions shape personal identity and experience.”]

X

Another coming out fic, this time he/they stede flavored!

After a conversation about gender with Ed, Stede decides to ask Jim for their expertise.

They answer the age old questions, how can you know you're trans without dysphoria?????? and, how do you know you're trans enough to use new pronouns????

the idea that trans people are "born/trapped in the wrong body" comes from the medicalization of transness - that's to say, when gender affirmation surgery became an option for trans people (specifically trans women), a panel of white cishet men would decide if they were trans enough to receive surgery.

It was these cis men who decided that if a trans women didn't abhor her penis that she wasn't trans, and this message was passed along to trans women who hoped to get surgery to be considered a legal woman.

So, these women listened to the experiences of those who were able to get the surgeries and modeled their experiences off of these to help ensure that they could get the care they needed.

It was a script to follow to receive recognition and safety and medical treatment as a trans person that got passed down until it became seen as a truth of the trans experience.

edit: i meant to include that, all these trans people claiming that they felt dysphoria even if they didn't skewed the data.

If transness was seen as as sacred and real as it inherently is, we wouldn't have this problem.

all this to say, your experience in your trans body is valid. if you love the anatomy you were born with, if you're neutral about it, if you want to enhance it or remove it or change it - all of these are real and good ways to inhabit your trans body. ❣️